Wizard's First Rule

[thatdarncat]

Third, an additional problem I had was that beyond the lack of description, we had the lack of actual fight scenes.

So your problem is that there wasn't enough fighting? Maybe then you should be looking elsewhere for your entertainment then. There's two types of critisim - impersonal and personal. Personal is based on your own wants and likes. This would be a personal critisim - not everyone wants a book filled with sword fights, every detail of which is described loveingly.

I'm not defending WFR - I thought it was ok, not terrible. Yes, maybe TG's a bit of a hack - but I haven't read the rest of the series. Yes, maybe he has a bit of a love of S&M, but so do lots of people (disclaimer: not me!)

 

[Darmanicus]

I've read the whole series and think they're great. I particularly like his pet Gar later on.

I think I'm going to have to read them again!

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Grrrrratch.... lug.... Richargg....

 

[SemperJase]

Gratuitous S&M sex just isn't my cup of tea. I stopped reading after book 3. That was two too many. Should have let it end after book 1.

The previous post was right. The rest of the books just make book 1 worse.

 

[takyris]

So your problem is that there wasn't enough fighting?

Yes.

Maybe then you should be looking elsewhere for your entertainment then. There's two types of critisim - impersonal and personal. Personal is based on your own wants and likes. This would be a personal critisim - not everyone wants a book filled with sword fights, every detail of which is described loveingly.

So, then, in your mind, the fact that he named the entire series "The Sword of Truth" doesn't have any bearing? I mean, if I wrote a novel called "Ice-Lances of Galspar" and then the entire novel involved people sitting around drinking tea in Galspar with the ice-lances slung over their shoulder, and occasionally people would scuffle, but the ice-lances would never come into play, I imagine that people would feel a bit misled.

So, I agree with you that it's a personal criticism on my part -- I like fight scenes. I don't need 'em all the time, thanks. However, in a series named after a sword, where the sword is the most powerful artifact (except for the boxes) in the book, I don't think hoping for a nice sword-fight somewhere is out of line.

And on an impersonal level, the few fights that were there were done badly. I'd have to hunt down the book again to quote stuff, but it was muddy and choppy and poorly detailed. I don't need to know every movement of every combatant (it's not good for a thirty-second fight to take five minutes to read), but a good writer knows which special details to add to give the reader enough information for their own minds to fill in the rest of the blanks. (There's a writing exercise that involves looking at the room around you, writing down every detail you can sense about that room until you've got a list of fifteen or twenty items, and then paring it down to the two or three things that you can say that will let the reader subconsciously fill in the rest of the details on his own -- I'm by no means great at it myself, but I can recognize good versus bad.) Goodkind was actually much better at the emotional aspects of his novel than the martial aspects -- I didn't like or find believable the emotions he raised, but at least he clearly articulated what he wanted me to think his characters were thinking.

 

[Maraxle]

So, then, in your mind, the fact that he named the entire series "The Sword of Truth" doesn't have any bearing? I mean, if I wrote a novel called "Ice-Lances of Galspar" and then the entire novel involved people sitting around drinking tea in Galspar with the ice-lances slung over their shoulder, and occasionally people would scuffle, but the ice-lances would never come into play, I imagine that people would feel a bit misled.

I wouldn't feel misled if the ice-lances held some special significance in the book, like the sword does in this series. I don't automatically assume that because a book has an object in the title, albeit a sharp one, someone's going to be swinging it around constantly.

 

[Rabelais]

Tell us how you really feel...

JD, you and I do not agree on many things, but I would say this:

Finish the book.

Because it gets better? Oh, heck no. Because the last hundred or so pages include the Terry Goodkind Bondage Hour, and also so that you can say, "Yes, I really did read the whole book, yes, really, all of it, and I still thought it was awful, yes, a bad romance novel disguised as a bad fantasy novel, and he never actually describes the sword in any more detail than 'a sword', except that it glows red when he kills someone angrily and white when he kills someone lovingly, I mean, please, can you GET any more phallocentric than that, and the characters act like David Eddings characters despite the fact that they've only known each other for a few days, leading one to suspect that Goodkind was unintentionally aping Eddings without understanding what Eddings did to make that level of teasing familiarity believable, and his supposedly strong female character spends the entire novel weeping about, and his hero sneers while killing people, which seems oddly nonheroic, and his monsters are never actually physically describes, such that it comes as a surprise to find out that they have arms, and he never actually has a, you know, sword-fight of any kind, where any kind of fight choreography might be said to happen, and he keeps breaking all of his own magical rules and then explaining it after the fact, and his powerful wizardly magic of "People are stupid" works about at the level of 6th-grader psychology, and the amazing twist at the end of the story was not so much foreshadowed as clubbed into our heads, such that the 'twist' is that the reader is annoyed with the idiotic protagonists for not figuring out stuff earlier, and the villains are ALL sexual sadists of one form or another, with such gems of characterization as 'His skin was as smooth as that of the young boys he favored' as attempts at character development for our evil bad guys, and really, fundamentally, an atrociously, insultingly, almost deliberately rotten book whose popularity is either a sign of the power of marketing or a lamentable indication of the supreme gullibility of a readership that is so simple, starved of critical thinking skills, and sexually frustrated that this rancid, waste of paper somehow seems anything less than an offensively putrid attempt at BDSM porn lit with a thin, spotty, slightly crusted veneer of fantasy."

But, you know, YMMV.

I'd have to agree... I imagine that Terry Goodkind spends a lot of time with women that look good in full leather body suits.

 

[Kalanyr]

I made it up to the book where Richard got taken on a Tour of the Empire by one of Jagang's escaped "pets" can't remember which one that was, couldn't make it through a book that was basically " Communism is bad" on every page (disclaimer: I give not a whit about Communism or any other politic viewpoint but I can't take having such an overt political message thrown at me every page while very little else redeeming is going on.).

That particular book also made a very special list of books I've started but haven't finished, only three books have made it on that list and I've read some really darn awful books.